Amazon Braket Notebooks support CUDA-Q NVIDIA for HQC
New Amazon Braket Notebook Instances Natively Support NVIDIA CUDA-Q, Revolutionising Quantum Development on AWS
An important quantum computing platform upgrade from AWS is that Amazon Braket Notebook settings now natively support CUDA-Q, NVIDIA's open-source hybrid quantum-classical computing architecture. Increasing NVIDIA's accessibility streamlines hybrid quantum-classical system developers' and scholars' workflows.
The connection lets customers run CUDA-Q programs in Amazon Braket Jupyter notebook instances without configuration. Native support is enabled by upgrading laptop instances to Amazon Linux 2023, which improves security, performance, and compatibility for quantum development workflows.
Smooth Hybrid Workflow Development
With this intrinsic feature, quantum researchers and developers can simply create and test hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. The platform simplifies hybrid algorithm creation, modelling, and execution in Braket-managed notebooks.
Native CUDA-Q support provides several key features:
GPU-accelerated calculations and quantum simulations can be combined in hybrid workflows. GPU acceleration: Amazon Braket makes NVIDIA GPUs available to developers for faster algorithm creation and simulation.
Access to Quantum Hardware: The platform lets users simply switch from simulation to Braket's quantum hardware. IonQ, Rigetti, and IQM offer single-managed Quantum Processing Units (QPUs). Amazon This release strengthens Braket's position as a comprehensive quantum computing research and development platform. It simplifies CUDA-Q use in managed notebooks by eliminating the need for developers to control local deployment or route execution via Hybrid Jobs.
New Environment Access and Pre-Installed Packages When customers create an Amazon Braket notebook instance, they get the latest kernel. New conda_braket tile may appear when you open the notebook. By selecting this tile under “Notebook” or “Console,” the new conda_braket kernel launches a Jupyter notebook or Python console session.
“CUDA-Q and Braket” tile opens example notebooks using the conda_braket kernel as the default kernel.
Braket notebooks come with the latest compatible packages for the four leading quantum development frameworks Braket, CUDA-Q, PennyLane, and Qiskit. Developers can verify installed packages with a command.
Several critical package versions are confirmed in the output, including:
Amazon Basket Algorithm Library 1.6.2
amazon-braket-default-simulator=1.31.4
Amazon-braket-pennylane-plugin=1.33.5
Amazon-braket-schemas=1.26.1
Amazon-braket-sdk=1.102.6
cudaq=0.12.0.post1
cudaq-qec=0.4.0.post1
cudaq-solvers=0.4.0
PennyLane=0.42.3
PennyLane_Lightning=0.42.0
1.4.4 qiskit
0.17.2 qiskit-aer
Qiskit-algorithms=0.4.0
qiskit-ionq=0.6.1
0.6.0 qiskit_braket_provider
Amazon Braket notebook instances come with quantum applications using Braket, CUDA-Q, PennyLane, and Qiskit. Users can view CUDA-Q examples on the Launcher page by clicking “CUDA-Q and Braket”. This opens the notebook 0_hello_cudaq_jobs.ipynb and shows more examples under nvidia_cuda_q/.
How to Implement and Examples
Small, CPU-based instance types like ml.t3.medium are recommended for laptop instances by AWS. Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs can perform GPU-intensive CUDA-Q apps. GPU-powered instances like ml.p3.8xlarge are recommended for these intensive tasks. GPU-accelerated instances include:
ml.p3.2xlarge (1 NVIDIA V100 GPU).
ml.p3.8xlarge (4 V100 GPUs).
ml.p3.16xlarge (8 V100 GPUs).
When running GPU-powered instances concurrently through Hybrid Jobs, a customer's Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service quota should exceed the number of instances they want.
The Previous Docker-Based Setup
Developers needed a Jupyter kernel running a CUDA-Q Docker container to execute CUDA-Q apps interactively in Braket notebooks before this native integration. This enables customers to run CUDA-Q simulators on Amazon Braket-supported quantum hardware backends and powerful NVIDIA GPUs using the open-source NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform and Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs.
Braket Notebook instances come with Docker, allowing controlled development using NVIDIA NGC Container Registry images.
The previous approach required several steps to configure a custom kernel:
Dockerfile creation: Stable Dockerfiles require CUDA-Q images like nvcr.io/nvidia/quantum/cuda-quantum:cu12-0.9.1. This file explained installing ipython, ipykernel, and amazon-braket-sdk.
Next, the image was built in three to five minutes.
For the new kernel (such as docker_cudaq), a kernel.json file was created containing command-line options for starting the kernel with the newly created Docker image.
GPU Access: Add “–gpus=all” to the kernel to access GPU instances like ml.p3.2xlarge, ml.p3.8xlarge, and ml.p3.16xlarge in CUDA-Q program.configuration in JSON.
This configuration mounts /home/ec2-user/amazon-braket-examples/examples inside the CUDA-Q container. If they needed more Python modules or updated CUDA-Q versions, they merely needed to tweak the Dockerfile and rebuild the Docker image.
Standard development in a controlled environment with native support now avoids this complicated setup.











